Unregistered sex offenders roam free

Many criminals are hard to track because of police's uncoordinated efforts, lack of arrest warrants

February 07, 2010|By Joe Mahr, Tribune reporter

At age 18, Marcus Dixon choked and raped an 11-year-old.

At 22 he molested a 9-year-old shopping in the Chicago dollar store where he worked.

At 34, after two stints in prison, he moved in 2007 without telling police, breaking a law requiring sex offenders to register their home and work addresses. It could have sent him back to prison.

But authorities never issued an arrest warrant. They didn't question key acquaintances. And when one alerted them to Dixon's address, Dixon wasn't picked up.

Officers eventually found the stocky fast-food worker 18 months later, but only by chance. A 911 caller reported seeing Dixon alone with a 14-year-old neighbor.

The teen told them he had raped her, too — several times.

Dixon's case highlights the struggle to catch area sex offenders who don't register their addresses. Despite increased police efforts to find the criminals, a Tribune review of law enforcement and court records found:

Nearly 800 Chicago-area sex offenders had been missing for at least a month.

Authorities failed to get arrest warrants for more than 80 percent of them. For those with prior convictions, 90 percent lacked warrants.

Police employ hit-and-miss hunting efforts, at times not making easy checks to see whether an offender is dead or in jail. One "missing" offender had been dead since 2001.

The failures combine to help unregistered offenders remain underground and unpunished. Without aggressive police pursuit, an offender might come into contact with police only during a routine stop, such as for speeding. An officer making the stop might not arrest an offender if there's no warrant for him.

The results anger the mother of the 14-year-old, who wonders why authorities didn't do more to catch Dixon before they found him with her teenage daughter.

"They are predators, and they lurk. They don't have a sign on them that says, 'I'm a pedophile,' " said the mother, whose name is being withheld to protect her daughter's identity. "I don't know why (police) don't keep better tabs on them."

No warrants

Lawmakers have long touted the laws as a way for police and the public to know of potentially dangerous ex-cons living nearby.

When sex offenders stop reporting where they live, federal officials have called for police to take a key step: Get an arrest warrant. A warrant is a formal order by a judge that enough evidence exists to take someone into custody, and federal officials believe so strongly in them that they are threatening to take away grant money from states that don't do it.

Illinois has a long way to go.

The Tribune studied a five-week period from mid-December to mid-January and found that 100 offenders had gone underground for at least a month after giving addresses in DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties. Suburban Cook County had 81 more offenders unaccounted for.

Chicago had the most: 590.

Of the 771 who were missing at least five weeks, warrants were issued for only 135 of them.

Among those who didn't have warrants:

• Michael Miterko, 52. In 2008, he molested a 13-year-old girl in Lake in the Hills. Given probation, he moved to Streamwood and went missing just before Halloween.

• Ronald Daniels, 53. Of his six stints in prison, two were for molesting children as young as 5. He has been missing from his Chicago address for at least six months.

• Timothy Eales, 27. Convicted in Indiana of molesting a 7-year-old, he moved to Des Plaines and went missing seven months ago.

• Kennthony Jackson, 33. The Oak Park man was convicted of sexual abuse with bodily harm against a 14-year-old in 1999. Sent to prison three times — twice for failing to register — he hasn't registered since 2006.

• Gary Waszak, 58. In 1996 he sexually abused a teenage boy in a Will County field. Paroled, he failed to register. Sent back to prison, he got out in 2003 and never registered.

Authorities say warrants aren't issued sometimes because the law isn't clear on who can issue them. That is the case for sex offenders who are released from prison and immediately go underground. Police cannot seek a warrant until they know where the person went.

"No one would disagree that a warrant for every offender would be terrific," said Cara Smith, of the Illinois attorney general's office. "It's just not that easy."

Yet even in cases where the law allows warrants to be issued, they often aren't, the Tribune discovered. That was particularly true in Cook County.

Several suburban departments ignored requests to explain why they did not routinely seek warrants. One that did, Schaumburg, said that warrants are not needed. During routine stops, police check databases that will show whether someone is an unregistered sex offender.